This month is sort of slow. I received a Seagate FreeAgent hard
drive, but I had to wait until after Christmas to really make use of it.
So this month is really just a prelude to what you can expect next.

Gaming took a back seat during December. What with Christmas
approaching and work I just didn't have time. I am still in the middle
of the Orc campaign in Warcraft III, but I have not played it at all
this past month.

However, gaming is taking a turn. My sons received an XBox 360 for
Christmas. I expect to be playing Halo 3 and at least one really good
racing game. I received Project Gotham Racing 4 and Forza 2. Next month
you will find out which is better and why.

I also tried to get the XBox Live thing going and that has a story
too.

I received a Seagate external hard drive. It is a 1.5 TB (yes, 1500
Gigabyte) drive. I have attached it to my Vista desktop PC. It was
either attach it to the PC or attach it to my Windows 2003 Server. I
chose the desktop because I am going to play recorded TV shows on it
from Media Center and the TV Tuner card in that PC. I expect the USB 2.0
drive will give better performance attached locally than through a 100
Mbit Ethernet connection.

I moved all my Recorded TV shows and all my ripped
movies to "the beast." I still have over 1 TB free after this. I
configure Media Center to use up to 500 GB of space for recorded TV
shows. I am going to re-rip all my movies. I plan to use the XBox 360 as
a media extender. My goal is to be able to watch any
recorded TV show or movie through the XBox.

I am going to record movies to WMV format (at 1500 kbps and full
resolution) and see how this works with the XBox. I am also planning on
ripping my movies to 320x240 resolution for my Zune (and my son's
iPods). I clearly have plenty of space, so two copies of movies won't
matter.

I am going to consider other formats for the movies. I have gotten just
a bit of audio syncing issues with movies. I can live with it when
watching on my Zune, but on a 65" TV I will be very picky. I am
contemplating ripping the movies from DVD in uncompressed VOB format. I
think Media Center will recognize this format. I will have to tell you
more next month when I have had time to test all of this.